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Introduction to Linux - A Hands on Guide

This guide was created as an overview of the Linux Operating System, geared toward new users as an exploration tour and getting started guide, with exercises at the end of each chapter.
For more advanced trainees it can be a desktop reference, and a collection of the base knowledge needed to proceed with system and network administration. This book contains many real life examples derived from the author's experience as a Linux system and network administrator, trainer and consultant. They hope these examples will help you to get a better understanding of the Linux system and that you feel encouraged to try out things on your own.

"We would like to announce the general availability of CentOS 7 for 64-bit x86 compatible machines. This is the first release for CentOS 7 and is version marked as 7.0-1406. Since the upstream EL7 release, there have been some updates released - these have been built and are being pushed to the CentOS mirror network at the moment. They will be available within the next 24 hrs. From this point on we will aim to deliver all updates within 24 to 48 hours of upstream releases. For the first time, this release was built from sources hosted at git.centos.org."

This is my first shot at a review on here so please excuse the unprofessional words... I'll start with, NIGHTMARE-FREE.

NFS and Samba have seen fit to nanny the user by restricting the sharing of the root directory even via LAN (seriously, if someone gets on THIS LAN, it's because they're inside my house stealing my computer!) - but I'm 99.99% sure this is not Centos's fault at all. Still, I'm adding it in on the 0.01% chance that it is. Plus, a lot of stuff in the GUI freezes when you remain connected to a Samba share whose host is shut off or otherwise inaccessible. And when I try to access Samba shares on a Windows machine, it acts very funky since the last update. Again, all of this is unlikely to be Centos's fault in any way.

Other than that, one of my two Centos 7 machines used to be a Windows gaming box and I haven't rebooted it back to Windows in 6 long months. If I'm not gaming, I'm using one Centos box as a workstation and another as a file server. I cannot possibly overstate how quick, efficient and convenient it is to work on Centos 7.

Aesthetically it puts Windows 7 to utter shame when you fire up KDE Plasma. Even Gnome-Classic is competitive. It's all crisp, clean and efficient.

It's also fast. Like, really fast. Linux is usually very fast, but compared to my old Centos 6.5 box, it is slightly faster than that when it comes to X apps. The interface has lost its odd quirks that used to make it less convenient than Windows in some areas, particularly cutting and pasting and navigating menus. That makes a moderate improvement in productivity for me, but even moderate improvements are good.

I had major conflicts with repos on earlier versions of Centos that haven't arisen after more intense usage here. For me that is a huge plus that gives this distro a score of 11 out of 10.

Centos 6.5 also had huge problems with its insane oom-killer stopping programs while I had huge amounts of physical RAM left. That hasn't reared its head here.

The native X drivers now give me full functionality with my nVidia and ATI cards alike. Transparencies, huge screen panning, all of that works now. I don't even need compiz, and those proprietary drivers are finally right out.

The bad part is that some programs are unavailable, like the KID3 music tagger program, though I found a replacement for that, and some other really useful (NOT!!!) software like animated backgrounds that I really find to be pretty. (They're only available on Ubuntu.) Flash is very funky on Centos 7 - it's very hard to get it working on most browsers - although I know for a fact that this isn't Centos's fault. There is another really irritating problem I can't think of right now that drags down my score on here back down to 10/10. Probably shows how important it is.

I use Linux for file serving, graphics editing, torrenting, writing, video conversions, listening to music, managing finances, watching videos, playing video games, messing with music editing, video chats with family, and my wife also uses Linux for much the same things plus blogging.